Height: 5’4
Weight: 110
Age: No thank you
Home: The Low Fall Court of the Seasons
Powers: She still holds little sway over all that grows in mortal lands, though more the moldy earth and fungal rot these days. Carpets of dead leafs and bones run through with roots and all that writhes within will heed when called and let her disappear into their embrace and emerge wherever they reach.
Description: To mortal eyes she’s beautiful still, though she hides her face behind a mask of bark. Her lithe body is made of gnarled branches of brown and faded green, her hair wild and full of dead leafs with horns of wood protruding backwards. She wears a dress of seamless leaf and her left arm is withered to a skeleton of branch and twig. Here and there the rest of her limbs show the beginnings of the same fate, patches of moldy-soft wood in darker hues. Down her back a spine of warped vine ends in a lashing tail.
Backstory: A long time ago she used to have a name and a purpose. When people feared and respected the deep woods and the cost of the land’s bounty. The roots drank deep from the animals sacrificed and fed on the buried dead and in exchange the harvests were strong and bellies fed. She had sway in those days and stood proud in the High Court of Fall, bargains made with mortals go a long way and they always had something to offer. And even as the old ways slowly faded she’d exchange an orchard heavy with fruit for a memory of moonlight, a kiss carved into bark, a dance or even a child once or twice.
But even those times waned and soon the mortals began to forget, starving her and her copse of nourishment, of favors. And worse, they fed their fields with poison and sapped the earth with fields of self-same crops year after year. She’d never been good at playing the games of the Courts and all her riches slowly drained away in desperate deals. Her once flourishing body gnarled into vines and twisted bark instead of flowers and ears of wheat and she slipped into the Lower Court.
And one day she heard the call of the dreaded Winter Court on the cold breeze. She’d tried to deny it to herself but the true death of stagnation slowly closed it’s grip around her and what was left to trade was naught but ‘Mellea’, a name once hers but now no more and though she slipped the grasp of ice and still, she’d made herself grotesque, a laughing stock among her kind.
Art by Talwyn Grimoir
